HP drops Itanium workstation line

It was obvious that the one-two punch of Opteron and then Intel's adoption of …

It was obvious that the one-two punch of Opteron and then Intel's adoption of x86-64 would spell trouble for Itanium, and now HP, the (for all intents and purposes) originator of IA-64, has axed its Itanium 2 workstation line so that they can focus on their 64-bit Xeon workstation line. From the Infoworld coverage:

Citing market conditions, the company ceased selling workstations based on the 64-bit processors on Sept. 1, just two months after the first processor based on Intel's 64-bit architecture for x86 systems, called EM64T (extended memory 64 technology) 64-bit x86 architecture, began shipping. "Basically this is a response to customer requirements in the workstation business," said Kathy Sowards, an HP spokeswoman via instant message.

HP was the only Itanium worstation vendor out there, and now there are none. HP's Itanium server line is still intact, though, and in fact servers made up the vast majority of HP's Itanium shipments. So I'd caution against taking this as a sign of Itanium's impending death. Still, it doesn't look good. And pointing out that HP's Itanium workstations made up a small fraction of their Itanium sales as a way of arguing the irrelevance of the company's decision to drop those workstations is, well, kinda silly. It would be like the parents in the Pied Piper story writing off the loss of the town's children by saying, "it's no big deal, because they weren't really old enough to matter anyway."

So I wonder how long Itanium will hold out at the top. The overwhelming trend has been that commodity x86 parts have crept higher and higher up the food chain, displacing traditional RISC designs one market segment at a time. There doesn't yet appear to be any limit to how high they'll go.